The Obligation to Be Disobedient – A Root of Modern Political Imagination

Abstract

This paper does not deal with the notion of constitutional resistance (ius resistendi), an ancient notion in Hungary, England or Poland, instead it focuses on the emergence of the notion of disobedience as not a political or moral opportunity, but a moral duty. The post-war political and moral imagination has emphasised – alongside with the notion of natural law – the moral (even legal) duty of disobedience in case of unjust law or order. Although in the political thinking the mainstream problem was how to cope with the rebel as an eternal danger for political community, the history of Christian moral thinking, arranged around the idea of conscience, produced the opposing notion of the duty of disobedience. In the Scholastic thinking, the problem of fallible conscience led to a debate between St. Thomas Aquinas and St. Bonaventura in which the first one argued that conscience should follow in any case, even against authority, while the second wrote that in case of conflict between one’s conscience and an authority, conscience should be put aside because of its
potential fallibility. The modern notion of the moral duty of disobedience is rooted in Aquinas’s argument in the debate.